You probably don’t think much about designing or updating your call center. You should. A recent good white paper from Interior Concepts, excerpted below, offers many practical suggestions of what needs to be considered during such an effort.

Call centers need more than cubes. While this task requires due diligence, the result will be a center that is more functional, productive and thus profitable. The capital investment in the facilities and furniture is insignificant compared to the most important asset; the agents working in the center. By doing it right you will benefit from higher productivity, improved employee morale, reduced employee turnover and a safer, healthier work environment.

Agent stations: The furniture design for a center will vary depending on whether the center is inbound or outbound. For example, inbound agents providing customer service/technical support may have a need to complete paperwork and may have storage requirements. In an outbound center the workstations tend to be smaller since the stations need only accommodate a phone and a computer.

We confess we weren’t good at math in high school, but we know this sounds like a good deal -- “The New Math: Double Your Results for Half the Cost.” That’s the title of a recent white paper from Contactual, and the subtitle makes it sound even better: “How Cloud-Based Contact Centers Minimize Risk and Increase Customer Satisfaction.”

This paper discusses “the vital role of contact centers, and examines the differences between on-premises contact centers and hosted alternatives,” according to Contactual officials: “It looks at the reasons why on-premises contact centers are becoming obsolete, and offers suggestions for how enterprises can eliminate capital expenditures while increasing customer satisfaction and staying on the forefront of innovation.”

Far too much good stuff to cover here, but some of the main points in the paper:

As SaaS has matured, it has instigated sweeping changes across the IT landscape, transforming industries like CRM and ERP; now contact centers are also undergoing a radical change. Among the underlying technologies supporting this change are VoIP (Voice- over IP) and internet-based communications, which provide superior functionality at a far lower cost than traditional systems.

Recently Amdocs’s Donna Rowlands, director of Market Strategy and Executive Audiences, sat down with David Meerman Scott, a marketing strategist on social network strategies and author of the widely-translated book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” to discuss how social media strategies can be implemented in communications services. Amdocs works with service provider professionals to find the information they need to make informed telecommunications decisions for their organizations.

In the interview, Rowlands asked Scott, a consumer of communications services, how he would like to see social media integrated in services. Scott said that while many companies have hopped aboard the social media bandwagon, his sense is that so many of the telecommunications “are kind of ignoring it.”

Scott explained that in his experience social media “is not really a part of the way that they communicate.”

“It’s as if they’re ignoring a communications revolution,” Scott said.

Sometimes it pays to just go back to the basics. A recent study from Five9 looks at on-demand call centers, and runs over some call center dynamics fundamentals it’s easy to forget in the complexity of actually running one.

The entire piece is well worth reading, some excerpts:

Types of calls are often divided into outbound and inbound. Inbound calls are calls that are made by the consumer to obtain information, report a malfunction, or ask for help. These calls are substantially different from outbound calls, where agents place calls to potential customers mostly with intentions of selling or service to the individual. Call center staff are often organized into a multi-tier support system for a more efficient handling of calls. The first tier in such a model consists of operators, who direct inquiriesto the appropriate department and provide general directory information.

If a caller requires more assistance, the call is forwarded to the second tier, where most issues can be resolved. In some cases, there may be three or more tiers of support staff. If a caller requires more assistance, the caller is forwarded to the third tier of support; typically the third tier of support is formed by product engineers/developers or highly-skilled technical support staff of the product.